By Xander Balwit

With death all but obsolete, Jamie’s life felt moot and emaciated. The Obituary Desk at The Times, where he worked, had turned into a ghost town he presided over with the bearing of a man who had given everything up for the bitter disappointment of a mine devoid of mineral riches. He would go on long walks around the deserted halls, choosing a different desk each day from which to work on whatever writing projects he could find. It was a shame, for death was what he liked writing about most.

Lives had been easier to frame when they’d been time-bound. A man at 60 is hardly the same man at 153, let alone 154, with how quickly things were changing. Happily, at least for Jamie, there were still the unfortunate saps who gave up the ghost to sheer accident or, lacking technological enthusiasm or a spirit of curiosity, elected to bow out early — or had never opted in to begin with.

Deaths were rare enough that when one was announced, those still employed in the Obits clamored, begged, and connived their way into a piece of the action. But after an ugly incident involving a bribe, a bottle of cognac, and the burning of an office chair, the holdouts had taken to drawing straws.

As luck would have it, Jamie drew the next reported incident. He didn’t know when exactly it would take place because chance, rather than age, had come to herald death’s arrival. No longer could one preempt those venerated elders whose lives had been haunted by finitude as now they sustained themselves through a regimen of drugs, diets, and therapies: products of the decades and countless billions poured into longevity medicine.

The call came a little after noon, just after Jamie had returned from the short walk down to his favorite cafe for his third cup of coffee that morning. The cafe line crept along at a glacial pace because their barista was one of the older task models — attractive, but inordinately slow — steaming milk with the rigidity of someone who detests babies but has found themselves holding a squalling one. There was an awkwardness about her that Jamie liked, a charm in the mechanical smile and uncanny valley of her handwriting on the cup he now tossed aside as he made his way out of the building to the scene.

Hurrying across the park, he could see the uprooted tree lying horizontally across the path before he saw the police tape. It had been a windy few days, a...

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